The present disclosure relates generally to the field of altering relevancy of a document by adding (e.g., to an index associated with the document) one or more term relationships (which may result, for example, in adding one or more non-obvious terms).
The present disclosure also relates generally to the field of altering relevancy of a search query by adding to the search query one or more terms based upon one or more determined term relationships (in one example, the added term(s) may be one or more non-obvious terms).
In various examples, altering relevancy of a document and/or a search query may be implemented in the form of systems, methods and/or algorithms.
In a conventional Internet search engine documents are continually identified and indexed. FIG. 1 shows one example of three hypothetical documents (in this example, Webpage A (identified by callout number 101), Webpage B (identified by callout number 103) and Text Document A (identified by callout number 105)). Also shown is the corresponding Index 107 that is maintained by the Internet search engine (not shown). As seen, in this example, Webpage A includes three different terms: Term 1, Term 2 and Term 3. Further, in this example, Webpage B includes four different terms: Term 4, Term 5, Term 6 and Term 7. Further still, in this example, Text Document A includes 2 different terms: Term 8 and Term 9. Finally, in this example, Index 107 identifies, for each respective document, the associated terms. Each of the terms may be a single word or multiple words.
In operation, when a user performs a search using the conventional Internet search engine, the user will enter one or more terms as keyword(s). The keyword(s) will be compared against the contents of the index and, based upon any matches between the keyword(s) and the indexed terms, the corresponding documents(s) will be returned to the user as the search results (the documents may be returned, for example, in the form of links). To give one concrete example, if the user inputs as two keywords the terms “Term 4” and “Term 9”, then Webpage B and Text Document A would be returned as search results.
In one specific example of a conventional Internet search engine, when a user performs a search the search engine checks the user's search history and the user's friends' search histories and gives the user results, for example, based on what the user looked at before, based on the user's friend's results that are similar to the user's results and based on what the user's friends have shared on social networking websites and the like. In this regard, it is believed that the search engine results (and any increase/decrease in relevancy) are based only on links that match to things shared from people in the user's social network.